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Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide

Posted on the 03 March 2013 by Geekybrains @sreekanth_br
People who are interested in web design must realize that building a website is a learning process. You have to learn it by making your hands dirty. Web designing is one of the art where you will learn from your mistakes.
Here is a checklist for getting started with Web Designing.

Start with the Basics


Learning Web Design: A Beginner's GuideHTML is the beginning of the websites, Hyper Text Markup language is a programming language for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on web. Now HTML is back in a big way with the HTML 5. This update includes dynamic elements added to the Hyper Text Markup Language.
  

W3Schools is one of the website to begin with HTML . "Try it yourself" is really interactive for the beginners.
You can also try learning some HTML tag usages and experiment them on your computer.Just write a piece of text mixed with some HTML tags in a notepad and save it with .htm (yeah not .html) file extension. then double click to open the file in your default web browser.

JavaScript
 

Once you are comfortable with HTML, the next step to move up is JavaScript. This is where a web designer have to turn static variables to live elements. Dynamic elements may be used to create animation. This is a little more advanced, but beginners who are interested in website building still need to consider the basics.
Cascading Style Sheet :
Cascading Style Sheets, commonly referred to as CSS is a concept that enhances fonts and styles for the entire page. It is important to learn how CCS works because it makes a web page look beautiful and it saves a lot of time as we can reuse the css code multiple times on a website.
code school- best website to learn css With this the web designer can stop using hundreds of HMTL tags throughout the webpage code and only use a couple of formatting codes in the beginning. It is possible to save a lot of time by simply defining the various fonts and styles with Cascading Style Sheets It is the perfect shortcut for people that want to finish their websites quickly.
 Learn CSS from Code School here

  Learn to build Dynamic Websites : 

Today's websites are not just a bunch of static pages but responsive and more user friendly. They use web technologies like PHP, MySQL [database], Ajax, XML, JavaScript etc.
You can now easily learn to build dynamic websites from Harvard University(where Mark Zukerberg built Facebook). This is an online course available to all for free.
need more free online resources ? You can find some places to learn coding online for free.
Choose a best Web Editor for making yourself comfortable :
People who really want to learn web designing should consider the value of the web editors.This is often how people become better at tagging and formatting their text and photos. Using an editor that can also create dynamic content that can help people see how the syntax looks.
There are some good free web development IDEs like BlueFish, Kompozer in Linux.For Windows users Adobe Dreamwaver can help a lot but it is not a free software.In this case using a free and open source webdevelopment IDE like Aptana studio is best option. Aptana Studio comes for Windows, Linux and Mac.


You can use Firebug in Firefox to learn how other websites are built and to debug your own website too. For beginners this browser extension is very useful.[Most of Geeky Brains blog stying is done through Firebug ]

Try experimenting on a free blog


The most important thing in web designing is the trial and error method.You can not simply learn web designing without creating a website (or a free blog). No need to worry about money!, you can simply open an account on Blogger or Wordpress to start your journey.With Blogging you can learn some basics of web designing. Once you are familiar with the web designing basics you can start your own website with all the control in your hand.
Website design will be fun and creative once you are familiar with the basics. Learning the foundation of website design inspires lots of people to consider advanced studies in web development.

This article is written by one of our reader Maria Benson. She is currently working at ppi claims.
We tweaked this article to add some resources to make this post much useful for all of our blog readers.
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